My client is one of the most successful e-commerce companies in Europe. The group has experienced tremendous growth and is looking to continue this over the coming years. To support this and take a leading role in a heavily project-based environment, Esanda Recruitment has been retained to this newly created role of IT Director.

The Successful IT Director will be responsible for:

• Define, measure and report on KPIs and availability SLAs as agreed upon with the Director ITIO and business vertical owners
• Develop tactical plans for managing capacity, including planned growth within all supported operations service areas
• Proactive monitoring of the companys online services in order to prevent, wherever possible, incidents from occurring and thereby maximizing availability and performance.
• Support the software development lifecycle process and ensure the deployment of new releases into the production environment is performed within agreed service levels.
• Maintain, operate and support all of the Companys online services including all vertical products, shared services, customer platform and database infrastructure.
• In conjunction with the Service Solutions team, contribute to project planning and deployment of new online initiatives.
• Ensuring that all Production Services teams adhere to agreed operational processes
• Ensuring that all Production Services objectives and goals are set in line with the overall strategy of IT Infrastructure and Operations.

The Successful IT Director will have:

• Strong IT infrastructure and application support experience in an online gaming or e-business company
• Strong release management experience in a dynamic IT environment, preferably in the gaming or similar e-business sector
• Experience in project management organising, planning and executing projects from inception through to implementation
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills
• Strong management and interpersonal skills capable of communicating and influencing at all departmental levels and with both technical and non-technical individuals
• Strong technical background with a particularly deep understanding of some of the following:
  • o Database technologies; Oracle, Microsoft SQL
  • o Server technologies; Windows Server, UNIX
  • o Web Server technologies; Apache, Tomcat, IIS, ASP, PHP
  • o Application technologies; Java, .NET, Active MQ, Tibco, Terracotta
  • Distributed application management
  • Experience working in the gaming sector or comparable high volume e-business
  • Excellent written and oral communication skills with a strong service focus
  • Experience working with geographically dispersed teams
  • Experience of software development lifecycle methodologies and principles
  • Experience of supplier management, contract negotiation and commercial management
  • Experience of managing resource/capacity planning for large teams and a track record of productivity improvement whilst maintaining customer satisfaction levels
  • Minimum 5 years of relevant management level experience